Why is slaking so fast?

Question

It looks like a huge fat monkey.Plus, it sleeps and loafs around all day. It only move once per 2 turns.Slowpoke is slow but why is slaking fast?

Answer 1

Albeit Slavking's pre-evolutions are based on sloths, Slaking have more physical resemblance to another animal, namely the peaceful gorilla. Quite alike the sloth, gorillas are peaceful and tranquil animals most of the time. The big difference between them however, is that whilst a sloth at best could give you good scratch with its claws if you came to close, gorillas are fast, more than capable of sprinting 20 mph. So you just have to see Slaking as a gorilla rather than a sloth o understand its speed from a logical perspective.
However, there might lie a reason in its other stats as well. When Slaking was designed, it's most likely that Game Freak wanted a incredibly powerful Pokemon with a terrible downside. Possibly, they wanted it to be on par with the legendary Pokemon of the time, so they gave it great stats. But to avoid it being to OP, even with Truant, they had to distribute the stats carefully. Less Speed would have possibly resulted in more SDef or Def, which would have made it almost impossible to kill. So its high Speed might be the cause of balancing, rather than making sense.

Comments

Great real life example : )

Answer 2

because it evolved from a fast Pokemon called vigoroth. my estimate is that your slaking still has speed from when it was a vigoroth.

Comments

A previous form does not affect the stats of the next evolution in any way, save for IV's, determined at birth, and EV's, gained in battle. A vigoroth's speed does not somehow remain in its evolution, and there are examples of stats going down or remaining the same upon evolution and mega evolution.

Answer 3

It has a base stat of 100 in speed, which makes it fat. Game Freak made it like that so I do t know how. Maybe being fast causes it tto only move 1 time in 2 turns, cause it may take energy out of it.

Hope I helped!

Answer 4

Well the first answer is giving you a statistical answer, I'd like to give you the reasoning.

The world’s laziest Pokémon. When it is lounging, it is actually saving energy for striking back

This is the pokedex entry from DPP and B&W.
Basically, slaking is charging up when it is not moving, allowing it to strike back immediately, the moment the turn of "loafing around" is over. This is why it was given a base speed of 100.

Of course, this doesn't explain how using skill swap or some other method to remove truant from Slaking still allows it to be so fast, because logically, this would slow it down as it would not get a chance to charge.

I guess that statistics and logic cant always match up, but there's decent reasoning behind making it a fast Pokemon I suppose.